At a Sandy anniversary panel organized by Forecast the Facts, Center for American Progress senior fellow Bracken Hendricks described how society needs to not only divest from climate-polluting fossil fuels but also invest in a sustainable, equitable future.

“The fight against the bad stuff and pulling that money back has to happen. I want to really drive home a second piece of this: We need to know what we want. Because it’s not enough to know what we don’t want. And we need to get very busy building it, and we need to demand it.”

“Demand that people focus on the pain and demand that people focus on what we need instead.”

“We need to be smart enough and insistent enough to demand a vision of a future we want to live in. It’s not enough to oppose what we know is going to hurt us.”

“The anniversary of Sandy in lower Manhattan is really a time to look at Wall Street, and how we can come together as people and have our collective voice be strong enough to make a difference in the face of very large pools of capital that, without us, are going to make a very grave mistake.”

Bracken Hendricks (@HendricksB) is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and works at the interface of global warming solutions and economic development. Hendricks was an architect of clean-energy portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He was founding executive director of the Apollo Alliance and has served as an energy and economic advisor to the AFL-CIO, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s Energy Advisory Task Force, and numerous other federal, state, and local policymakers and elected officials.

The Forecast the Facts forum, “Turning the Tide: The Challenge And Promise Of Carbon Divestment for a Post-Sandy Wall Street,” took place on Sunday, October 29, at Cooper Union’s Rose Auditorium in New York City, with panelists from the Center for American Progress, Next Generation, and NYU Divest.